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Quote by Sheila Jeffreys

“But the increasing independence of women provided a direct threat to the maintenance of male power and privilege. That no such threat did materialise, it will be argued here, owes a great deal to the success of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a counter-revolution and constituted a timely adjustment to the fine-tuning of the heterosexual institution. [...] . Sex was constructed to be the new binding ingredient in marriage which would compensate for the decreased efficiency of legal and economic constraints. The 1960s was a new time of crisis for male supremacy and a new adjustment had to be made.”

Quote by Sheila Jeffreys

Work

Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution

Anticlimax delves into the complexities of the sexual revolution, examining its implications and consequences through a feminist lens. The book investigates how the movement has shaped contemporary attitudes towards sex, relationships, and gender roles. more

Author

Sheila Jeffreys
Sheila Jeffreys

Sheila Jeffreys is a renowned political scientist born on May 13, 1948. Her research focuses on gender politics and feminist theory, offering profound insights into issues of gender inequality and women's rights. more

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“Originally and naturally, sexual pleasure was the good, the beautiful, the happy, that which united man with nature in general. When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the internal, the diabolical.”

“Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one's sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honor and duty, bravery and self-control. But the pathology and emotionality of these psychic attitudes are strongly at variance with the reality of one's personal behavior. The man who attains genital satisfaction, is honorable, responsible, brave, and controlled, without making much of a fuss about it. These attitudes are an organic part of his personality. The man whose genitals are weakened, whose sexual structure is full of contradictions, must continually remind himself to control his sexuality, to preserve his sexual dignity, to be brave in the face of temptation, etc. The struggle to resist the temptation to masturbate is a struggle that is experienced by every adolescent and every child, without exception. All the elements of the reactionary man's structure are developed in this struggle. It is in the lower middle classes that this structure is reinforced most strongly and embedded most deeply. Every form of mysticism derives it's most active energy and, in part, also it's content from this compulsory suppression of sexuality.”

“More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.”